Generate PDFs on the fly. PDFlib is a development tool for PDF-enabling your software or generating PDFs on your server. PDFlib offers a simple-to-use API for programmatically creating PDF files from within your own server-side or client-side software. PDFlib doesn't make use of third-party software for generating PDFs, nor does it require any other tools. PDFlib+PDI can import existing PDF files. PDFlib Personalization Server (PPS) includes PDFlib+PDI, plus additional functions for automatically filling PDFlib blocks. PPS also includes the PDFlib Block Plugin for creating blocks interactively. PDFlib is available for all major operating environments and development environments.

A PDFlib program can be used for dynamically generating PDF – reflecting user input or dynamic data retrieved from web or database servers. The PDF Import Library (PDI) can be used to integrate pages from existing PDF documents into the generated output. With the PDFlib Personalization Server (PPS), server side personalization of PDF files becomes possible.

With the programmer only being responsible for producing the data from whatever source, PDFlib takes the task of generating the PDF code which visually represents the data.

PDFlib can generate PDF data directly in memory (instead of on file), resulting in better performance and avoiding the need for temporary files, thus being the fastest PDF-generating method.

PDFlib makes PDF generation possible without wading through the PDF specification. While PDFlib tries to hide technical PDF details from the user, a general understanding of PDF is useful. In order to make the best use of PDFlib, application programmers should ideally be familiar with the basic graphics model of PostScript (and therefore PDF). However, a reasonably experienced application programmer who has dealt with any graphics API for screen display or printing shouldn’t have much trouble adapting to the PDFlib API as described in the PDFlib manual.

API: PDFlib offers an easy-to-use programming interface for the application programmer. The PDFlib API shields the programmer from the technicalities of PDF generation. Any programmer with decent graphics or print output experience is able to use PDFlib quickly. The PDFlib reference manual explains the basics of PDFlib programming, and provides a detailed reference to all API functions. Sample programs are provided for all supported environments.

Server Deployment: PDFlib is thread-safe, i.e. it can safely be used in multi-threaded server applications. The COM edition is both-threaded for improved performance. C or C++ library clients can install their own memory management and error handling routines. PDFlib's memory management has been rigorously engineered and tested for memory leaks in order to guarantee 24-hour deployment without any shutdown periods.

Products available in the PDFlib family include:

PDFlib - PDFlib is the leading developer toolbox for generating and manipulating files in Adobe’s well known Portable Document Format (PDF).

PDFlib+PDI - PDFlib+PDI includes all PDFlib functions plus the PDF Import Library (PDI). With PDI you can open existing PDF documents and incorporate some pages into the PDFlib output.

PDFlib TET PDF IFilter - TET PDF IFilter extracts text and metadata from PDF documents and makes it available to search and retrieval software on Windows. This allows PDF documents to be searched on the local desktop, a corporate server, or the Web.